Prospects for Advanced Speech Translation

Speech communication includes many impor-tant issues on natural language processing and they are related with desirable advanced speech translation systems. Advanced systems need to be able to handle the interaction for speech communication, pragmatics in speech, and arbitrariness of speech usage. General characteristics of speech communication are discussed. Also the various viewpoints regarding interaction, pragmatics, and arbitrary usage are discussed. Some of the present speech translation approaches are explained and new basic technologies are introduced. In this paper, a synthetic NLP technology such as a composite art form is proposed for speech communication and speech translation.